Totalitarian movements absorb and neutralize rival parties’ political doctrines through their very names.

Evidence

The same ingenious application of slogans, coined by others and tried out before, was apparent in the Nazis’ treatment of other relevant issues. When public attention was equally focused on nationalism on one hand and socialism on the other, when the two were thought to be incompatible and actually constituted the ideological watershed between the Right and the Left, the “National Socialist German Workers’ Party” (Nazi) offered a synthesis supposed to lead to national unity, a semantic solution whose double trademark of “German” and “Worker” connected the nationalism of the Right with the internationalism of the Left. The very name of the Nazi movement stole the political contents of all other parties and pretended implicitly to incorporate them all. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 837

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the construction of the political ‘Other’ and how movements claim to subsume identity categories — relevant to Orientalism’s claim that the West absorbs and redeploys Eastern identities for its own ends.